The present invention relates to a system for cooking food both in the home and in professional kitchens, which is adapted to control in a fully automatic way the food cooking processes it is performing.
Cooking appliances are known to be in many cases, equipped so as to be capable of automatically monitoring the cooking progress, or the state of cooking, of any given food item. For instance, the EP-B-O 232 802 discloses the use of opto-electronic means that are adapted to detect the variations in the infrared-light transmission and/or reflection coefficient of the food being cooked in view of automatically de-energizing the heating elements as soon as said variations decrease below a pre-determined value that is indicative of a condition of completed cooking.
Other cooking appliances are also known, for instance from DE-A-3 533 997, to be equipped with sensor means that are adapted to detect the presence and/or the size of a cooking pan or utensil in order to regulate correspondingly, in an automatic way, the exact area of the heating elements that has to be energized each time.
However, such solutions enable the problem of an actual fully automatic control of a food cooking process to be only partially solved, since they are practically limited to the control of single, particular aspects thereof, while leaving out of consideration the various other parameters that, according to the nature and properties of the food being cooked, contribute to making up and determining the actual cooking process. This practically means that, in the cooking appliances as they are known from the prior art, the actual control of each food cooking process performed therewith is mainly determined by actions performed manually by the user.